


The Love of Truth

by Cambusmore



Category: Bloomsbury Group RPF
Genre: M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:25:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5471312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cambusmore/pseuds/Cambusmore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>George Mallory poses for Duncan Grant at Brunswick Square on a bright autumn day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Love of Truth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disenchanted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Любовь к правде](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8268559) by [rootofallevil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rootofallevil/pseuds/rootofallevil)



> Dear hero of impeccable taste,
> 
> Such a wonderful prompt deserved the kiss itself. I love these two individually and together and I prefer not really knowing what happened between them. That way, we can dream. I hope you enjoy this. 
> 
> Happy Yuletide!

Because he had hurried from Russell Square underground, nearly running for fear of being late, he now spends a few moments on the doorstep of 38 Brunswick Square catching his breath, letting the damp air chill the sweat beading at his temples. Duncan must not see him breathless, for it could read as eagerness. And the degree to which he is looking forward to this and dreading this, in equal, quarrelling parts, he does not wish to let on in the least. Of course the flush on his cheeks will glow like anything for at least an hour, always does even from the mildest exertion. The pink never really drains away, except when he falls ill, according to his mother and sisters.

George steals himself to ring, not knowing which of the varied and varying inhabitants of the house will answer. It could be Vanessa Bell (she insists on given names) or Clive Bell, Adrian Stephen, or even, God forbid, Maynard Keynes, who is all perfectly correct and even friendly enough in his own way, but he never looks at one when he speaks and when he finally does, it isn’t quite how one would wish to be looked at. There is disquieting appraisal behind the mild, short-sighted eyes. And all together, they make a din of cleverness in which one can feel easily lost. They are not tiresome exactly, but they are occasionally tiring, particularly in numbers.

The bell sounds shrilly somewhere in the depths of the house and it’s a little while before he hears feet thudding on the stairs, just enough time to pat at the sheen on his forehead with a handkerchief and affect a casual study of the autumn riot in the square itself behind him.

“Good morning, George. Thank you for coming.”

He looks as warm and fine as ever, smiling broadly with that mouth of his.

“Not at all,” he replies. “I am eager to be immortalised.”

Duncan grimaces modestly and holds the door wide, bowing and inviting him in with a sweep of the hand, “This way lies immortality,” and George laughs, perhaps a shade too loudly as the jangle of his nerves gives way to a stab of genuine pleasure.

As he’s ushered past the sitting room and up the stairs, George sees no one else despite his temporary blindness in the dark house, hears only the creak of the wood and the cadence of their steps and knows that they are alone. Visitors shall not pass at Brunswick Square without being prodded at and exclaimed over. He sags fractionally with relief. Duncan leads the way up and up, the smell of linseed oil and photo chemicals beckoning from above.

In the neat little attic studio, George helps Duncan move a table nearer the window, in front of a screen decorated, no doubt by the artist himself, with abstract shapes in earthen hues. A bowl sits on the mantle, glazed in white and sage and the colour of fire. Everything seems to be the colour of something very definite, say the sky or an oak or the moon, as if Duncan has stolen fragments of the outside. The overall effect calms George considerably. Only the canvases strike a note of discord, stacked against the walls and each other, turned around so it seems that they are shunning him.

“I’m glad we could do this here,” says George when they finish and the dust motes they have raised are drifting back to their rest.

“Yes, it was good of you to come.”

“Charterhouse is...there are very many clergyman about...it isn’t at all suited to posing nude, as it were.” _Christ_ , George thought, _I sound practically keen._

“And,” Duncan added, “your door doesn’t lock.”

_The door doesn’t lock._

That is what George had managed to say, blurted even, when Duncan had pulled away from kissing him, his eyes slitted with pleasure and his mouth ample and slack. Dumbfounded, thunderstruck, alarmed and so aroused his skin began to sing, George had blinked, breathed once and announced that the door didn’t lock because it was the only thought for miles around. Immediately, the growing ease between them, the dawning warmth George thought he felt reflected back at him, froze and shattered. What hadn’t been intended as a rebuke had been taken as one, as Duncan proved by gathering his sketches and charcoal and taking a hasty and awkward leave.

George discerns no rancour in Duncan’s expression now. A statement of fact, without malice. He smiles as he always does, mild and unfathomable, with sleepy eyes and the corners of that full mouth.

“No, it doesn’t lock.” And for lack of a better idea, George digs a finger into the knot of his red necktie and began to work it free.

Duncan continues to smile. “You don’t need to get undressed just yet. I need to get the camera out and mounted. Wine?”

 _God, yes._ “Yes, please.”

***

“Are you cold?”

“No, not much. The wine did the trick.”

Duncan had started by taking a few photos of George standing by the window, looking over his shoulder at the camera. The forceful pattern of the screen in the background contrasted nicely with the blankness of his skin, he said. George wasn’t sure he should take this as a compliment.

Then a few climbing poses that had felt utterly and distressingly ridiculous, but that Duncan had insisted were beautiful.

“Oh,” he contributed, scintillatingly.

Between the clicks of Duncan squeezing the bulb attached to the Brownie and the cranking of the advancing film, a feeling wells in George, yet another odd duality of emotion, in which he gains a growing, effortless confidence in his motions, and a deepening unease about the quality of his company. For all the fluid movement of his body and the way it absorbs Duncan, he can’t help but worry that he has nothing to contribute otherwise. A little drop of poison, a fraction of the way James had once made him feel, blooms in his guts.

“You can sit down on the table now. If you like?”

George does, he perches on the edge of table with his knees up and clasps his ankles, relishing the momentary relief at the stretch the change of position affords. A simple pleasure, but a very real one.

Duncan looks down into the viewfinder and moves a few inches to his right. “You’re very quiet all of a sudden,” he ventures, not looking up.

“Aren’t you ever afraid that we’ll have nothing to talk about?” George asks and tries his best not to wince. That is the fault of the wine again, fair friend in heat and sworn enemy in speech.

“Whyever not?”

“Well, the artist and the schoolmaster...There is little common ground there.”

 _Click_. Duncan cranks the film forward.

“I suppose so, but I have plenty to talk about with Maynard and he’s an economist.”

“Yes,” he equivocates.

“You don’t seem persuaded.”

“Maynard is also” -  _boldly now, George_  - “your lover.”

Duncan glances up finally and smiles, rather more with his eyes than his mouth. “He was my lover, yes, but he never let me forget he was an economist first.” They laugh a bit weakly at that, a break in the sudden tension that George cannot decipher, although it strikes him as very unlike animosity.

Duncan squeezes the bulb again. _Click._ “One summer, I invited him to Versailles, which I adore, it’s a heavenly spot.” George must have pulled a face, for Duncan nearly giggled. “Don’t look so surprised! It appeals to my aristo side, all that gilt and baroque.”

He waves the bulb dismissively. “No, but the gardens and the Petit Trianon...I understand Marie-Antoinette’s need for that little mock village. I mean, _I_ need it and no one watches me eat and shit.” More laughter, and it feels to George like the wine is slinking warmly over his skin, down to his belly and his toes, up his neck to his cheeks.

“Anyway, Maynard comes there to visit me and we walk the grounds and I watch him taking it in, just drinking in the beauty and the competing smells of the garden, all these riotous perfumes piling on top of each other, so that it’s just shy of vulgar, and we go sit, reverentially quiet behind the mill in the Petit Hameau, the perfect setting and moment for an idyll. And Maynard gazes about, blinks behind his glasses and sighs, and I think that he will speak of the beauty of the world or his love for me, but instead, he begins to explain, at incredible length mind, about the triumph that is the Versailles' plumbing and how it compares favourably to Berlin’s. I tell you, George, it was criminal.”

They are reduced to helpless fits of laughter as Duncan, a rather gifted mimic, drones on in Maynard’s soft monotone about clay piping and drainage areas. By the time he describes the treatment of sewage, George must dash tears away. Duncan comes around from the camera and for a moment, George knows that he will touch him, feels and wants the inevitability of it. But he simply produces a handkerchief and returns to the tripod. 

“So you see George, just as I loved the man rather than the economist, surely the artist can chat easily to the mountaineer, as they are both men.”

“Can you separate the two? In yourself, I mean, artist and man?”

“I must or I would spend all my time rearranging people’s limbs and making them stand still. Can you separate the man and the mountaineer?”

“I do not believe so, not truly.”

“And the schoolmaster from the man?”

“Oh, yes.”

“There you have it.”

“What? What do I have?”

“A purpose rather than a hobby.”

_Click._

George thinks for a moment and sits up. “A refuge more than anything else.”

Duncan removes the camera from its mount and begins to work the bellows flat. “How so?”

“For one, it is very beautiful on the tops of mountains, even the ones that seem ordinary, like our little Welsh hills. There is something about the angle from the summit…it doesn’t seem like a view meant to be beheld by mortal eyes somehow. It feels like stealing.”

Duncan lays the camera on his desk and lights a cigarette, watches. George continues. “All these affairs, all the mundane dramas of the heart, they make the world feel very small. Your life depends on a letter, a look, a kiss- the smallest gestures imbued with such significance. And when it feels like you can no longer breathe for the crush of your tiny life, nothing reminds you of the great breadth of the world like a mountain.” He drains the last of his wine and adds, “That’s what I found anyway.” It’s his only concession to the catastrophe of James Strachey in Duncan’s company. He of course must know all about it because James and Lytton are inveterate, unforgivable gossips.

Duncan sits at his desk chair and smokes, sending plumes racing to the ceiling only to languish there when they reach it. George desperately needs a cigarette, but can’t quite ask for one.

“You see,” Duncan says eventually, “there is a way of seeing things, of feeling, a philosophy if you want to make it as formal as all that, that we share, that drew me to you and keeps me near. Honesty and the love of truth. That is something, I think, that we hold in common. It is an easier way to live at times because one can feel more one’s self, look one’s self in the eye, as it were. But it is sometimes much harder, as when we show one’s feelings too readily, to people who are not disposed to receive them.”

“One cannot arrange one’s feelings,” George agrees quietly.

“No, one cannot. That is why I kissed you at Charterhouse that evening. I cannot help wanting to express my feelings for people to them, and mine are so complicated towards you that I was conscious that a kiss would somehow do it.”

George gazes back levelly at Duncan. “And I only meant that the door did not lock.”

And then, amazingly, after a few seconds spent in a hell of suspense, Duncan begins to laugh again. “Here am I lamenting my love of truth and you were honest all along. George, put your clothes on. Will you stay?”

Almost reluctantly, George slips off the table and upright, bending to pick up his clothes in the waning gold light of the autumn evening. “When will the photos be ready?”

“Next week. Or when I can scrape together the cash for some more emulsion.” Duncan comes to join George near the window, leaning against the frame and watching him dress unabashedly. He takes the cue and slows down, pulling his braces up with dragging fingertips, angling himself just so to button his shirt. “I can tell you what I saw in the meantime, though.”

“As a man or an artist?” George asks a little unsteadily, for Duncan moves closer and he finds he is all he wants to see.

“Both. Either.”

“What did you see as an artist?”

“Marble, shade, sinew, light, depth, white, pink, blue...black,” he finishes, pushing a fall of George’s hair away from his forehead and tucking it behind his ear.

“And what did you see as a man?”

“The bump from an old break of your ankle, muscle, flushed cheeks, the rise and fall of your ribs as you breathed, the black of the hair between your legs, smooth skin…” The list trails off. His hand has moved, his palm hot and dry against the back of George’s neck. George is glad of having put his clothes back on for what they conceal.

“I’ll stay,” he replies, and leans back against the warmth of Duncan’s hand, closing his eyes.


End file.
